Emiliano Cáceres Manzano Photos.
On the third floor of a library in downtown New Haven, a garden explodes into bloom.
Clippings spring from dozens of mason jars and glasses of all shapes. Leaves—round, spiky, soft, lush, green, even purple—burst from their containers with life. In the corner, a particularly excited fern leaps over the railing. Opposite from it, a large glass water dispenser perches on a small wooden chair. A laminated sign invites visitors to take a cutting or leave a seed.
The garden is the centerpiece of nosegay: a plant based exhibition, running through June 23 at the Gallery Upstairs at the Institute Library. Curated by Maxim Schmidt with work from 33 Connecticut artists, the show builds on its title, which references a small bouquet of flowers. After years of co-curation alongside Martha Willette Lewis, it marks Schmidt’s curatorial debut.
“It feels like a culmination of a lot of what I’ve been working towards for the last couple of years,” Schmidt said in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon. “I’ve been asking, ‘How do I actualize the values I want [to see] in a gallery and the space that I've working in?’”
“I really wanted to completely open up the opportunity as broadly as possible … especially with their being as few artspaces as there are in New Haven,” he added. “And I wanted to live out what we do really well in the Gallery Upstairs, which is sort of offering a seat at the table” to every artist who walks through the library’s doors. That feels especially vital now, he added, as libraries come under attack nationally.
Top: Maxim Schmidt helps install "Glorious Index" at the IL last year. Lucy Gellman File Photo. Bottom: Installation view. Emiliano Cáceres Manzano Photo.
As Schmidt prepared for the show earlier this year, he held a completely open call, in which artists could submit as much work as they wanted to with the understanding that some of it might not make the final show due to space constraints. Ultimately, almost three dozen artists submitted work, from “well-decorated regulars,” like Scott Schuldt, Joan Fitzsimmons and Annie Sailer to total newcomers like Channah, a five-year-old girl who Schmidt met through his work at a local church. (“I think kid art is the highest form of art,” he said with a genuine sense of awe).
“This felt like exactly what I knew I could do very well for the community and the community really showed up and filled the garden,” he said. “I feel like I put in the raised beds,” and artists did the rest.
Nadine Nelson’s installation Root & Bloom: A Propagation Exchange, as well as her accompanying print suite Bloom Love, capture that spirit in real time. In the installation, clippings grow from every direction, there with the invitation for viewers to bring their own in return, and thus continue growing this community garden. The result is a kind of communal pot from which green thumbs can take what they need.
A multi-media artist and a chef, Nelson described Root & Bloom as a “metaphor for growth and connection,” drawing a parallel between the sharing and blooming of the clippings and the way ideas and relationships bloom when shared. At the exhibition’s opening earlier this spring, she paired her piece with sustainable offerings of her own making, turning it into even more of an invitation for connection.
Around Root & Bloom, the exhibition includes mixed-media collages, paintings of migrant farm workers (those, picturing a strawberry farm by Andres Madariaga, are more timely than the artist could have once predicted), and even an installation of a branch with translucent pictures of moss hung on it. On one wall, a large painting titled Divine Touch shows hands reaching for brightly colored flowers against a sunset. The painting seems to glow from within, thanks to its artist, Connecticut-based painter Annette Womack.
Top: Notes From Smoke Farm (2012). The piece, which documents Schuldt's year as the first artist-in-residence at Smoke Farm in Washington state, is 30 x 53 inches of hand-sewn bead work. Bottom: Some of the books in the exhibition.
On another wall, a picture of a man hiking through a densely wooded forest reveals itself to be intricate, hand-sewn beadwork on found canvas. The man looks small compared to the tree trunks depicted, twice as wide and almost three times as tall. A red line winds through the canvas, recalling a map or a pen’s annotations. The piece, Notes from Smoke Farm, is by Schuldt, a board member of the Institute Library.
Schmidt said that Schuldt, who has helped with the Gallery’s shows for years, has been especially supportive of the exhibition. That’s also true of Lewis, who he praised for her support.
“To have that kind of trust with people is such a gift,” Schmidt said.
The exhibit contains smaller works as well, with standouts including a series of collages by Connecticut artist Kate Butler. In one, titled A Network that Never Sleeps, a black-and-white photo of a midcentury workspace is overlaid over a textbook photo of pink flowers. The brightly colored flowers peek out through the square windows in the multi-level workspace, cheering up the rigid order and lines of the architecture.
The tension between the beauty of the natural world and the people toiling away, heads down, at work, animates the collage. The tension also re-emphasizes the exhibit’s impassioned call to attendees not to miss out on appreciation for the natural world right outside their windows.
The exhibit is especially multidisciplinary as well. Notes from Smoke Farm is bordered with equations, bringing math into visual art. The piece overlooks a library cart of books where nature features prominently, from Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Bill Laws’s Fifty Plants that Changed the Course of History, all available for checkout. The kaleidoscopic range of works and artists exemplifies what one volunteer called the transformation of “art into community,” a testament to New Haven’s vibrant and interconnected arts scene.
The Institute Library is surely worth a visit for the nosegay exhibit, but a visit to the gallery is also just a starting point. Founded in 1821, the IL feels unique for its community programming, its beautiful handwritten call cards, its use of the Borden classification system (as opposed to the Dewey Decimal system), and its hand-carved toilet seat. The entrance to the library is tucked away discreetly between EBM Vintage and CVS, easy enough to miss if you’re not looking for it.
Inside, a narrow staircase opens up into shelves and shelves of books, both recent and ancient, like a New Haven Directory dating back to 1896. A bulletin board put together with care by volunteers advertises upcoming events. A table at the top of the staircase next to the call desk hosts notable books like a new edition of Karl Marx’s Capital and a printed-out article on “Badass Librarians Who Changed History (They Will Not Be Shushed.)”
In the library, it is unlikely that the librarians will be so presumptuous as to shush you. In the month of June alone, the Library will host jazz vinyl listening sessions on Fridays, a visit from the New Haven Theater Company’s actors to read out loud to patrons, and the nosegay closing reception on June 21, with more food from Nelson.
nosegay stands out not just for its wide-ranging artistic offerings, but for the way it functions as an introduction to a long-standing New Haven institution’s work as a way to link together many different aspects of New Haven’s cultural life.
nosegay runs at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven, through June 23 with a closing reception on June 21. Lucy Gellman contributed reporting.